USA! USA! We’re No. 2! We’re No. 2!

Something has gone wrong in America in the 21st century. A sense of pessimism, a feeling that the proverbial glass is half empty rather than half full, has taken hold of much of the populace.

And don’t blame it on Barack Obama. It predates his presidency.

When the World Bank reported last week that the Chinese economy might overtake ours later this year, not many Americans were surprised. In fact, a plurality of Americans have thought for years that the Chinese economy already had passed ours.

Frank Bruni DESCRIBES this national funk thusly:

More and more I get the sense that we’ve lost it, and by “it” I mean the optimism that was always the lifeblood of this luminous experiment, the ambition that has been its foundation, the swagger that made us so envied and emulated and reviled.

We’re walking small. And that shift in our gait and our gumption has been palpable for many years, during an unusually sustained period of frustration that has the feel of something more than a temporary dive: a turned corner, the downward arc of a diminished enterprise.

In a lengthy memo that he shared with Politico late last year, the Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik assessed what he called “a decade of anger and disaffection,” noting that for 10 years in a row, according to polling by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal, the percentage of Americans who believed that the United States was on the wrong track exceeded the percentage who thought it was on the right track. That’s a change in the very character of the country.

Something has gone wrong in America in the 21st century. A sense of pessimism, a feeling that the proverbial glass is half empty rather than half full, has taken hold of much of the populace.

And don’t blame it on Barack Obama. It predates his presidency.

When the World Bank reported last week that the Chinese economy might overtake ours later this year, not many Americans were surprised. In fact, a plurality of Americans have thought for years that the Chinese economy already had passed ours.

Frank Bruni DESCRIBES this national funk thusly:

More and more I get the sense that we’ve lost it, and by “it” I mean the optimism that was always the lifeblood of this luminous experiment, the ambition that has been its foundation, the swagger that made us so envied and emulated and reviled.

We’re walking small. And that shift in our gait and our gumption has been palpable for many years, during an unusually sustained period of frustration that has the feel of something more than a temporary dive: a turned corner, the downward arc of a diminished enterprise.

In a lengthy memo that he shared with Politico late last year, the Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik assessed what he called “a decade of anger and disaffection,” noting that for 10 years in a row, according to polling by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal, the percentage of Americans who believed that the United States was on the wrong track exceeded the percentage who thought it was on the right track. That’s a change in the very character of the country.